Читать книгу Greek Mavericks: Giving Her Heart To The Greek - Jennifer Taylor - Страница 19

CHAPTER NINE

VIVEKA HUGGED THE front of her gaping dress to her breasts and could barely meet her own glassy eyes in the mirror. She was flushed and aroused and deeply self-conscious. She couldn’t believe what she’d just done, but she had no regrets. She had enjoyed giving Mikolas pleasure. It had been extraordinary.

She had needed that for herself. She wasn’t a failure in the bedroom after all. Okay, the lounge, she allowed with a smirk.

Her hand trembled as she removed the pins from her hair, pride quickly giving way to sexual frustration and embarrassment. Even a hint of desolation. If she wasn’t such a freak, if she wasn’t afraid she’d lose herself completely, they could have found release together.

Being selfless was satisfying in other ways, though. He might be thanking her for breaking up the wedding and saving him a few bucks, but she was deeply grateful for the way he had acknowledged her as worth saving, worth protecting.

The bathroom door that she’d swung almost closed pushed open, making her heart catch.

Mikolas took up a lazy pose that made carnal hunger clench mercilessly in her middle. The flesh that was hot with yearning squeezed and ached.

His open shirt hung off his shoulders, framing the light pattern of hair that ran down from his breastbone. His unfastened pants gaped low across his hips, revealing the narrow line of hair from his navel. His eyelids were heavy, disguising his thoughts, but his voice was gritty enough to make her shiver.

“You’re taking too long.”

The words were a sensual punch, flushing her with eager heat. At the same time, alarm bells—anxious clangs of performance anxiety—went off within her, cooling her ardor.

“For?” She knew what he meant, but she’d taken care of his need. They were done. Weren’t they? If she’d ever had sex before, she wouldn’t be so unsure.

“Finishing what you started.”

“You did finish. You can’t—” Was he growing hard again? It looked like his boxers were straining against the open fly of his pants.

She read. She knew basic biology. She knew he’d climaxed, so how was that happening? Was she really so incapable of gratifying a man that even oral sex failed to do the job?

“You can’t... Men don’t...again. Can they?” She trailed off, blushing and hating that his first real smile came at the expense of her inexperience.

“I’ll last longer this time,” he promised drily. “But I don’t want to wait. Get your butt in that bed, or I’ll have you here, bent over the sink.”

Oh, she was never going to be that spontaneous. Ever. And for a first time? While he talked about lasting a long time?

“No.” She hitched the shoulder of her dress and reached behind herself to close it. “You finished. We’re done.” Her face was on fire, but inside she was growing cold.

He straightened off the doorjamb. “What?”

“I don’t want to have sex.” Not entirely true. She longed to understand the mystique behind the act, but his talk of sink-bending only told her how far apart they were in experience. The more she thought about it, the more she went into a state of panic. Not him. Not tonight when she was already an emotional mess.

She struggled to close her zip, then crossed her arms, taking a step backward even though he hadn’t moved toward her.

He frowned. “You don’t want sex?”

Was he deaf?

“No,” she assured him. Her back came up against the towel rail, which was horribly uncomfortable. She waved toward the door he was blocking. “You can go.”

He didn’t move, only folded his own arms and rocked back on his heels. “Explain this to me. And use small words, because I don’t understand what happened between the lounge and here.”

“Nothing happened.” She couldn’t stand that he was making her wallow in her inadequacy. “You... I mean, I thought I gave you what you wanted. If you thought—”

He didn’t even want her. Not really. He would decide if and when, she recalled.

Good luck with that, champ. Her body made that decision for everyone involved, no matter what her head said.

Do not cry. Oh, she hated her body right now. Her stupid, dumb body that had made her life go so far sideways she didn’t even understand how she was standing here having this awful conversation.

“Can you just go?” She glared at him for making this so hard for her, but her eyes stung. She bet they were red and pathetic looking. If he made her tell him, and he laughed— “Please?”

He stayed there one more long moment, searching her gaze, before slowly moving back, taking the door with him, closing it as he left. The click sounded horribly final.

Viveka stepped forward and turned the lock, not because she was afraid he’d come in looking for sex, but afraid he’d come in and catch her crying.

With a wrench of her hand, she started the shower.

* * *

Mikolas was sitting in the dark, nursing an ouzo, when he heard Viveka’s door open.

He’d closed it himself an hour ago, when he’d gone in to check on her and found her on the guest bed, hair wrapped in a towel, one of his monogramed robes swallowing her in black silk. She’d been fast asleep, her very excellent legs bare to midthigh, a crumpled tissue in her lax grip. Several more had been balled up around her.

Rather than easing his mind, rather than answering any of the million questions crowding his thoughts, the sight had caused the turmoil inside him to expand, spinning in fresh and awful directions. Was he such a bad judge of a woman’s needs? Why did he feel as though he’d taken advantage of her? She had pressed him into this very chair. She had opened his pants. She had gone down and told him to let go.

He’d been high as a kite when he had tracked her into her bathroom, certain he’d find her naked and waiting for him. Every red blood cell he possessed had been keening with anticipation.

It hadn’t gone that way at all.

She’d felt threatened.

He was a strong, dominant man. He knew that and tried to take his aggressive nature down a notch in the bedroom. He knew what it was like to be brutalized by someone bigger and more powerful. He would never do that to the smaller and weaker.

He kept having flashes of slender, delicate Viveka looking anxious as she noticed he was still hard. He thought about her fear of Grigor. A libido-killing dread had been tying his stomach in knots ever since.

He couldn’t bear the idea of her being abused that way. He’d punched Grigor tonight, but he wished he had killed him. There was still time, he kept thinking. He wasn’t so far removed from his bloodline that he didn’t know how to make a man disappear.

He listened to Viveka’s bare feet approach, thinking he couldn’t blame her for trying to sneak out on him.

She paused as she arrived at the end of the hall, obviously noticing his shadowed figure. She had changed into pajamas and clipped up her hair. She tucked a stray wisp behind her ear.

“I’m hungry. Do you want toast?” She didn’t wait for his response, charging past him through to the kitchen.

He unbent and slowly made his way into the kitchen behind her.

She had turned on the light over the stove and kept her back to him as she filled the kettle at the sink. After she set the switch to Boil, she went to the freezer and found a frozen loaf of sliced bread.

Still keeping her back to him, she broke off four slices and set them in the toaster.

“Viveka.”

Her slender back flinched at the sound of his voice.

So did he. The things he was thinking were piercing his heart. He’d been bleeding internally since the likeliest explanation had struck him hours ago. When someone reacted that defensively against sexual contact, the explanation seemed really obvious.

“When you said Grigor abused you...” He wasn’t a coward, but he didn’t want to speak it. Didn’t want to hear it. “Did he...?” His voice failed him.

* * *

Viveka really wished he hadn’t still been up. In her perfect world, she never would have had to face him again, but as the significance of his broken question struck her, she realized she couldn’t avoid telling him.

She buried her face in her hands. “No. That’s not it. Not at all.”

She really didn’t want to face him.

But she had to.

Shoulders sagging, she turned and wilted against the cupboards behind her. Her hands stayed against her stinging cheeks.

“Please don’t laugh.” That’s what the one other man she’d told had done. She’d felt so raw it was no wonder she hadn’t been able to go all the way with him, either.

She dared a peek at Mikolas. He’d closed a couple of buttons, but his shirt hung loose over his pants. His hair was ruffled, as though his fingers had gone through it a few times. His jaw was shadowed with stubble and he looked tired. Troubled.

“I won’t laugh.” He hadn’t slept, even though it was past two in the morning. For some reason that flipped her heart.

“I wasn’t a very happy teenager, obviously,” she began. “I did what a lot of disheartened young girls do. I looked for a boy to save me. There was a nice one who didn’t have much, but he had a kind heart. I can’t say I loved him, not even puppy love, but I liked him. We started seeing each other on the sly, behind Grigor’s back. After a while it seemed like the time to, you know, have sex.”

The toaster made a few pinging, crackling noises and the kettle was beginning to hiss. She chewed her lip, fully grown and many years past it, but still chagrined.

“I mean, fourteen is criminally young, I realize that. And not having any really passionate feelings for him... It’s not a wonder it didn’t work.”

“Didn’t work,” he repeated, like he was testing words he didn’t know.

She clenched her eyes shut. “He didn’t fit. It hurt too much and I made him stop. Please don’t laugh,” she rushed to add.

“I’m not laughing.” His voice was low and grave. “You’re telling me you’re a virgin? You never tried again?”

“Oh, I did,” she said to the ceiling, insides scraped hollow.

She moved around looking for the tea and butter, trying to escape how acutely humiliating this was.

“My life was a mess for quite a while, though. Grigor found out I’d been seeing the boy and that I’d gone to the police about Mum. He kicked me out and I moved to London. That was a culture shock. The weather, the city. Aunt Hildy had all these rules. It wasn’t until I finished my A levels and was working that I started dating again. There was a guy from work. He was very smooth. I realize now he was a player, but I was quite taken in.”

The toast popped and she buttered it, taking her time, spreading right to the edges.

“He laughed when I told him why I was nervous.” She scraped the knife in careful licks across the surface of the toast. “He was so determined to be The One. We fooled around a little, but he was always putting this pressure on me to go all the way. I wanted to have sex. It’s supposed to be great, right?”

Pressure arrived behind her eyes again. She couldn’t look at him, but she listened, waiting for his confirmation that yes, all the sex he’d had with his multitude of lovers had been fantastic.

Silence.

“Finally I said we could try, but it really hurt. He said it was supposed to and didn’t want to stop. I lost my temper and threw him out. We haven’t spoken since.”

“Do you still work with him?”

“No. Old job. Long gone.” The toast was buttered before her on two plates, but she couldn’t bring herself to turn and see his reaction.

She was all cried out, but familiar, hopeless angst cloaked her. She just wanted to be like most people and have sex and like it.

“Are you laughing?” Her voice was thready and filled with the embarrassed anguish she couldn’t disguise.

“Not at all.” His voice sounded like he was talking from very far away. “I’m thinking that not in a thousand years would I have guessed that. Nothing you do fits with the way other people behave. It didn’t make sense that you would give me pleasure and not want anything for yourself. You respond to me. I couldn’t imagine why you didn’t want sex.”

“I do want sex,” she said, flailing a frustrated hand. “I just don’t want it to hurt.” She finally turned and set his plate of toast on the island, avoiding his gaze.

The kettle boiled, giving her breathing space as she moved to make the tea. When she sat down, she went around the far end of the island and took the farthest stool from where he stood ignoring the toast and tea she’d made for him.

She couldn’t make herself take a bite. Her body was hot and cold, her emotions swinging from hope to despair to worry.

“You’re afraid I wouldn’t stop if we tried.” His voice was solemn as he promised, “I would, you know. At any point.”

A tentative hope moved through her, but she shook her head. “I don’t want to be a project.” Her spoon clinked lightly as she stirred the sugar into her tea. “I can’t face another humiliating attempt. And yes, I’ve been to a doctor. There’s nothing wrong. I’m just...unusually...” She sighed hopelessly. “Can we stop talking about this?”

He only pushed his hands into his pockets. “I wasn’t trying to talk you into anything. Not tonight. Unless you want to,” he said in a wry mutter, combing distracted fingers through his hair. “I wouldn’t say no. You’re not a project, Viveka. I want you rather badly.”

“Do you?” She scoffed in a strained voice, reminding him, “You said you would decide if and when. That I was the only one who wanted sex. I can’t help the way I react to you, you know. I might have tried with you tonight if I’d thought it would go well, but...”

Tears came into her eyes. It was silly. She was seriously dehydrated from her crying jags earlier. There shouldn’t be a drop of moisture left in her.

“I wanted you to like it,” she said, heart raw. “I wanted to know I could, you know, satisfy a man, but no. I didn’t even get that right. You were still hard and—”

He muttered something under his breath and said, “Are you really that oblivious? You did satisfy me. You leveled me. Blew my mind. Reset the bar. I don’t have words for how good that was.” He sounded aggrieved as he waved toward the lounge. “My desire for you is so strong I was aroused all over again just thinking about doing the same to you. That’s why I was hard again.”

If he didn’t look so uncomfortable admitting that, she might have disbelieved him.

“When we were on the yacht, you said you thought it was exciting that I respond to you.” Her chest ached as she tried to figure him out. “If the attraction is just as strong for you, why don’t you want me to know? Why do you keep—I mean, before we went out tonight, you acted as if you could take it or leave it. It’s not the same for you, Mikolas. That’s why I don’t think it would work.”

“I never like to be at a disadvantage, Viveka. We had been talking about some difficult things. I needed space.”

“But if we’re equal in feeling this way...? Attracted, I mean, why don’t you want me to know that?”

“That’s not an advantage, is it?”

His words, that attitude of prevailing without mercy, scraped her down to the bones.

“You’ll have to tell me sometime what that’s like,” she said, dabbing at a crumb and pressing it between her tight lips. “Having the advantage, I mean. Not something I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Not something I should want to go to bed with, frankly. So why do I?”

He did laugh then, but it was ironic, completely lacking any humor.

“For what it’s worth, I feel the same.” He walked out, leaving his toast and tea untouched.

* * *

Mikolas was trying hard to ignore the way Viveka Brice had turned his life into an amusement park. One minute it was a fun house of distorted mirrors, the next a roller coaster that ratcheted his tension only to throw him down a steep valley and around a corner he hadn’t seen.

Home, he kept thinking. It was basic animal instinct. Once he was grounded in his own cave, with the safety of the familiar around him, all the ways that she’d shaken up his world would settle. He would be firmly in control again.

Of course he had to keep his balance in the dizzying teacup of her trim figure appearing in a pair of hip-hugging jeans and a completely asexual T-shirt paired with the doe-eyed wariness that had crushed his chest last night.

He couldn’t say he was relieved to hear the details of her sexual misadventures. The idea of her lying naked with other men grated, but at least she hadn’t been scarred by the horrifying brutality he’d begun to imagine.

On the other hand, when she had finally opened up, the nakedness in her expression had been difficult to witness. She was tough and brave and earnest and too damned sensitive. Her insecurity had reached into him in a way that antagonism couldn’t. The bizarre protectiveness she already inspired in him had flared up, prompting him to assuage her fears, reassure her. He had wound up revealing himself in a way that left him mistrustful and feeling like he’d left a flank unguarded.

Not a comfortable feeling at all.

He hadn’t been able to sleep. Much of it had been the ache in his body, craving release in hers. He yearned to show her how it could be between them. At the same time, his mind wouldn’t stop turning over and over with everything that had happened since she had marched into his life. At what point would she quit pulling the rug out from under him?

“Are you taking me back in time? What is that?” She was looking out the window of the helicopter.

He leaned to see. They were approaching the mansion and the ruins built into the cliff below it.

“That is the tower where you will be imprisoned for the rest of your life.” There was a solution, he thought.

“Don’t quit your day job for comedy.”

Her quick rejoinder made humor tug at the corner of his mouth. He was learning she used jokes as a defense, similar to how he was quick to pull rank and impose his control over every situation. The fact she was being cheeky now, when he was in her space, told him she was shoring up her walls against him. That niggled, but wasn’t it what he wanted? Distance? Barriers?

“The Venetians built it.” He gazed at her clean face so close to his, her naked lips. She smelled like tea and roses and woman. He wanted to eat her alive. “See where the stairs have been worn away by the waves?”

* * *

Viveka couldn’t take in anything as she felt the warmth off the side of his face and caught the smell of his aftershave. She held herself very still, trying not to react to his closeness, but her lips tingled, longing to graze his jaw and find his mouth. Lock with him in a deep kiss.

“We preserved the ruins as best we could. Given the fortune we spent, we were allowed to build above it.”

She forced her gaze to the view, instantly enchanted. What little girl hadn’t dreamed of being spirited away to an island castle like in a fairy tale?

The modern mansion at the top of the cliff drew her eye unerringly. The view was never-ending in all directions and the ultracontemporary design was unique and fascinating, sprawling in odd angles that were still perfectly balanced. It was neither imposing nor frivolous. It was solid and sophisticated. Dare she say elegant?

She noticed something on the roof. “Are those solar panels?”

“Naí. We also have a field of wind turbines. You can’t see them from here. We’re planning a tidal generator, too. We only have to finalize the location.”

“How ecologically responsible of you.” She turned her face and they were practically nose to cheekbone.

He sat back and straightened his cuff.

“I like to be self-sufficient.” A tick played at the corner of his mouth.

Under no one’s power but his own. She was seeing that pattern very clearly. Should she tell him it made him predictable? she wondered with private humor.

A few minutes later, she followed him into an interior she hadn’t expected despite all she’d seen so far of the way he lived. The entrance should have struck her as over the top, with its smooth marble columns and split staircase that went up to a landing overlooking, she was sure, the entire universe.

The design remained spare and masculine, however, the colors subtle and golden in the midday light. Ivory marble and black wrought iron along with accents of Hellenic blue made the place feel much warmer than she expected. As they climbed the stairs, thick fog-gray carpet muffled their steps.

The landing looked to the western horizon.

Viveka paused, experiencing a strange sensation that she was looking back toward a life that was just a blur of memory, no longer hers. Oddly, the idea slid into her heart not like a blade that cut her off from her past, but more like something that caught and anchored her here, tugging her from a sea of turbulence to pin her to this stronghold.

She rubbed her arms at the preternatural shiver that chased up her entire body, catching Mikolas’s gaze as he waited for her to follow him up another level.

The uppermost floor was fronted by a lounge that was surrounded by walls of glass shaded by an overhang to keep out the heat. They were at the very top of the world here. That’s how it felt. Like she’d arrived at Mount Olympus, where the gods resided.

There was a hot tub on the veranda along with lounge chairs and a small dining area. She stayed inside, glancing around the open-plan space of a breakfast nook, a sitting area with a fireplace and an imposing desk with two flat monitors with a printer on a cabinet behind it, obviously Mikolas’s home office.

As she continued exploring, she heard Mikolas speaking, saying her name. She followed to an open door where a uniformed young man came out. He saw her, nodded and introduced himself as Titus, then disappeared toward the stairs.

She peered into the room. It was Trina’s boudoir. Had to be. There were fresh flowers, unlit candles beside the bucket of iced champagne, crystal glasses, a peignoir set draped across the foot of the white bed, and a box of chocolates on a side table. The exterior walls were made entirely out of glass and faced east, which pleased her. She liked waking to sun.

Don’t love it, she cautioned herself, but it was hard not to be charmed.

“Oh, good grief,” she gasped as Mikolas opened a door to what she had assumed was a powder room. It was actually a small warehouse of prêt-à-porter.

“Did you buy all of Paris for her?” She plucked at the cuff of a one-sleeved evening gown in silver-embroidered lavender. The back wall was covered in shoes. “I hate to tell you this, but my foot is a full size bigger than Trina’s.”

“One of your first tasks will be to go through all of this so the seamstress can alter where necessary. The shoes can be exchanged.” He shrugged one shoulder negligently.

The closet was huge, but way too small with both of them in it.

She tried to disguise her self-consciousness by picking up a shoe. When she saw the designer name, she gently rubbed the shoe on her shirt to erase her fingerprint from the patent leather and carefully replaced it.

“Change for lunch with my grandfather. But don’t take too long.”

“Where are you going?” she asked, poking her head out to watch him cross to a pair of double doors on the other side of her room, not back to the main part of the penthouse.

“My room.” He opened one of the double doors as he reached it, revealing what she thought at first was a private sitting room, but that white daybed had a towel rolled up on the foot of it.

Drawn by curiosity, she crossed to follow him into the bathroom. Except it was more like a high-end spa. There was an enormous round tub set in a bow of glass that arched outward so the illusion for the bather was a soak in midair.

“Wow.” She slowly spun to take in the extravagance, awestruck when she noted the small forest that grew in a rock garden under a skylight. A path of stones led through it to a shower area against the back wall. Nozzles were set into the alcove of tiled walls, ready to spray from every level and direction, including raining from the ceiling.

She clapped her hand over her mouth, laughing.

The masculine side of the room was a double sink and mirror designed along the black-and-white simplistic lines Mikolas seemed to prefer, bracketed by a discreet door to a private toilet stall that also gave access to his bedroom. Her side was a reflection of his, with one sink removed to make way for a makeup bench and a vanity of drawers already filled with unopened cosmetics.

“You live like this,” she murmured, closing the drawer.

“So do you. Now.”

Temporarily, she reminded herself, but it was still like trying to grasp the expanse of the universe. Too much to comprehend.

A white robe that matched the black ones she’d already worn hung on a hook. She flipped the lapel enough to see the monogram, expecting a T and finding an M. She sputtered out another laugh. He was so predictably possessive!

“Can you be ready in twenty minutes?”

“Of course,” she said faintly. “Unless I get lost in the forest on the way back to my room.”

My room. Freudian slip. She dropped her gaze to the mosaic in the floor, then walked through her water closet to her room.

It was only as she stood debating a pleated skirt versus a sleeveless floral print dress that the significance of that shared bathroom struck her: he could walk in on her naked. Anytime.